Winner of the Award for Best Play at the Kishon Israeli Comedy Festival 2023.
A poetic comedy about a family, with quite a few communication problems, on a train fleeing their homeland. The parents unsuccessfully try to break some bad news to their daughter. The train travels – no one knows where it’s going, and why it isn’t stopping. At one point, a man enters the carriage, and further destabilizes the relationship between the girl and her parents. How long has he been on the train? Two years? Fifty? He was forgotten there, and his entire family was destroyed. At one point, the girl jumps off the train. This jump, possibly to her death, allows all the characters a kind of “rebirth”. The play shifts from the realm of the personal and psychological to the fixations of the “nation” – Nazis. Holocaust. Refugees by train, etc. This creates a movement between the real and concrete towards the abstract and symbolic. (From the article by Udi Ben Saadia)
Eldad Cohen was born and raised in Jerusalem.
Books: Look At Me (1998), At Least You Would Have Died in An Orderly Manner (2003), and Wake Up Mum (2019), all published by Yedioth Books. His children’s book Blue Melody with Curls (2012) was published by Am Oved. Many of his short stories and monologues have been adapted for the stage and won awards. Plays: Look At Me (an adaptation of his book), Balloon, Areas and Farewells, and Repertory Theatre. Awards for this play include Playwright of the Year, Golden Hedgehog Awards 2013; First Prize, Stockholm Fringe Festival 2013; and First Prize, International Comedy Festival, Romania 2017. It was one of the finalists for a prize at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2012, and has been translated into English, Romanian, French, and Swedish, among others. His plays for children were performed at Haifa International Children’s Theater Festival: My Summer Holiday (First Prize), and End, Beginning and Cat in collaboration with Jordan Bar-Kochva, and Maybe an Elephant (Directing Prize), which became a successful television series.
Sharon Stark is a playwright and director, after being a dancer and an actor for many years. At thirteen, she left home to study at the School of American Ballet in New York. After graduating, she joined Scapino Ballet Rotterdam. Following an injury, she returned to Israel and studied acting at Nissan Nativ Acting Studio. Her credits include dozens of critically acclaimed roles at Haifa Municipal Theatre and The Jerusalem Khan Theatre. This led to her becoming an independent creator, exploring the paradoxes of modern life, self-definition, and contradictions that are part of our identity, often involving a slightly surreal parallel reality, and focusing on love, parenting, and education. Her work has been presented in theatre festivals and at prominent independent theatre venues, including Tmu-na Theater and Tzavta Theatre in Tel Aviv, as well as Haifa Municipal Theatre. Her plays have been translated into English and Georgian (Trulove Ltd.)